Guest Column
Save to Disc, Save to Soul…and Purgatory
- Save to Disc, Save to Soul…and Purgatory
- By Luis de Guerrero Osio y Rivas
- As hardwiring demands reconnecting through heat, strong heat; Purgatory sounds now incredibly modern, and right!
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“Death was imminent; suddenly I saw my whole life pass before my eyes in detail in an instant”. Many people have at least heard this before. Victims of car accidents, soldiers in the battlefield have told of similar experiences. What’s more, this seems to be a universal phenomenon that knows no boundaries. It’s been told in all languages, in all countries, by all races, by all creeds.
Difficult to believe, it presents a challenge. How is it possible that a whole lifetime of information can be retrieved in a second? Where does it come from? Where does it go? What does it mean?
Before the advent of computing no one could make heads or tails out of this. But we can try now.
Immense streams of information are moved every day at dazzling speeds by computers; but computers, even now move at a snail’s pace by comparison. As a matter of fact no one has calculated the amount of memory an average human being can store in his lifetime, least of all the speed required to transfer it in ‘an instant’. We intuit we are on track of something big, but still realize a lot of speculation and experimentation remains to be done in one of the most interesting fields we could open to science.
The first question, where does it come from can have a simple answer, the memory banks in our physical brains. We don’t have to exert ourselves in any way to believe this. We don’t foresee any resistance to the general acceptance that our memories reside in our brains. Hypnosis has long since revealed the minute detail in which memories of any moment of our lives are kept.
Simply stated, the answer to the question “where does it come from” presents no problem whatsoever.
There is, however, much more to be said on the source, our brains. Free will has a physical explanation in the human brain itself. It has been studied as ‘brain plasticity’; actually a heading in Roger Penrose’s “The Emperor’s New Mind” which being a bestseller stands a better chance to be in your library for consultation. In a nutshell, and staying on with our computer comparison our brains are not ‘hardwired’, but on the contrary resemble our hard disks on which you can write and rewrite. We can adopt beliefs and reject them, take on habits and drop vices. A criminal can become a saint, and all stand a chance to be converted in principle into anything, or to be so stubborn as to make a mule look most liberal by comparison. I’ll leave the technical details to your reading in Penrose’s book.
The rest is not so simple. As it occurs every time we save to disk we are speaking of survival, and in this particular case we are speaking not of info trivia being kept, but of the survival of man after death. Here, of course, a longstanding opposition has always existed. It touches upon our deepest feelings, prejudices, hopes and desires. Camps are divided between those desirous of life and those desirous of death and oblivion; camps so divided by the simple acceptance, or rejection, of life after death. Our next question: Where does it go, for somewhere it must, bespeaks already of the soul. It would be absurd to add a phenomenon so staggering to the meaningless of existence; but there’s a large party extant of those which deserved Whitehead’s quip “None are more surprising than those who spend their whole lives trying to prove life is meaningless” (probably referring to his one time associate Bertrand Russel’s atheism).
And here comes the staggering point: made for choice, always flexible to accept or reject and back again through repentance; we do mature, and harden into our ways. Made for choice this can’t be endless, and the moment itself bespeaks definition: a freezing of choice with death.
What had no reason to be endlessly changeable, needs not hold promise of future plasticity.
Is there a readymade theory to fit?
Yes, in religion.
Freedom to be good or evil has a price in eternal bliss or eternal damnation; freedom of choice has to harden eventually. But still and only referring to bliss, if only perfection can be admissible as a definite state, where are those slight imperfections to change without ‘brain plasticity’s help?
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